When I graduated from high school, a friend gave me a simple journal made of a three ring binder covered with nice fabric and filled with line paper. Because of that, when I was in college, I wrote in my journal just about everyday. Since then, I have always kept a journal but haven't been as consistent about writing in it regularly. Several years ago, I started writing my journal on the computer because it could be saved forever and took up less space. The only drawback was that we kept our computers in the basement and I couldn't always get on the computer. So a year ago, I signed up for an account on LDSJournal.com which allows you journal from anywhere you can access the internet. I didn't start really taking advantage of the website until last month when I really started feeling like I wanted to write more about my life and the things happening in our family. Just in the past two months, I have written a lot more often than I had been writing in any two month period over the past year.
LDSJournal.com is a great website for journaling! It's not just a place for writing journal entries, there's also a section where you can fill in information about yourself like your birth date, life events, your education, your family, etc. Every time you start a new entry, there's a prompt/question in case you need help thinking of something to write about. I feel it's important to write in a journal for many reasons. A few of the reasons are to remember important events and experiences, to process and deal with hardships, and to see patterns in your life.
One, a journal is a good way to remember your experiences. While we may think we will always remember the significant events in our lives, we often don't. For example, when our older son was a baby, I thought I'd never forget every cute little thing he did or milestones he reached but now that we're on our third child, I find myself wondering "when did Charlie start rolling over?" I am realizing that the older I get, the worse my memory is!
Two, a journal helps you think about your experiences and what they mean to you. When I have a problem or struggle, I write about it in my journal and just writing it down helps me feel better. It's like talking to a friend. I have gone back and read about those hard times and realized that I have grown and learned from those experiences. Being able to look back through my entries and knowing that I go through the hard times helps me have the strength and confidence to face my current challenges. Of course, I don't just write about the bad or hard things I have dealt with, I write about the good and happy things too. One of the main reasons why I started writing more in my journal is to document all the cute things my kids do or say.
Three, a journal helps you to see patterns in your life. This in a way is related to reason number two - when you write down your experiences, you are able to see a pattern in how you deal with situations. You can see your strengths and weaknesses. For me, I can also see how God's hand is evident in the things that have happened to me: How he has helped me during the hard times and how he has led me to where I am today.
This blog is also a journal of sorts but because anyone can see it, I obviously don't write about everything I would write about in my journal. I would be interested in hearing about your journals and other reasons why people write in journals.
3 comments:
How often do you go back over old journal entries? I write because the act of writing helps me remember things, but I seldom read my entries after that.
Anonymous: I go back to reread my entries once in a while when I'm trying to remember what happened or if I'm feeling nostalgic and want to review certain events. I am currently dealing with a recurring issue and when it resurfaced a few months ago, I searched my journal to review how long it took me to recover and the degree of my recovery at different points in time. Because I had a hard time finding entries relating to this issue, I wished that I had been better at recording my condition at the time.
Do you rely on tags to keep track of which entries cover which topics? For example, to sort out which entries were about your condition and which were about one of your children? It seems like that would be difficult to keep track of so many entries in a paper-and-pen journal but an online journal might be easier in that sense. Perhaps I would re-read old entries more often if I could find what I was looking for more easily.
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